Each year at this time, I look forward and predict trends in social media for the coming year. But first, I look back at my predictions from last year. How’d I do? Not bad.

2011 Recap: Social Business, Google+ & Facebook Places

Social media continues to move forward toward business integration, a trend that I identified last year. In a joint study from Booz & Company and social platform developer Buddy Media, 57 percent of businesses surveyed plan to increase social media spending, while 38 percent of CEO’s label social as a high priority.

I was also partially accurate in predicting that Google would “strike back” in 2011. They did, with Google Plus, a formidable initiative that acts as Google’s “social layer” to the Web. Part social network and part social search, Google Plus has industry observers scratching their heads, wondering if Facebook will be given a run for their money or if the service evolves into something complimentary in a highly social Web.

I had one big swing-and-miss on Facebook’s intrusion in the location-based services war. While Facebook still supports location tracking in a number of ways, it has not put Foursquare out of business. Foursquare still enjoys a niche audience of highly active participants who enjoy telling the world where they are and post pictures to prove it. It is however worth noting that Facebook recently acquired location based network Gowalla, so continue to watch this space.

2012 Predictions

So what can we expect in 2012 in a world that seems to grow ever connected by the hour? Here are six predictions to ponder, in no particular order:

Convergence Emergence

For a glimpse into how social will further integrate with “real life,” we can look at what Coca Cola experimented with all the way back in 2010. Coke created an amusement park where participants could “swipe” their RFID-equipped wristbands at kiosks, which posted to their Facebook account what they were doing and where. Also, as part of a marketing campaign, Domino’s Pizza posted feedback — unfiltered feedback — on a large billboard in Times Square, bringing together real opinions from real people pulled from a digital source and displayed in the real world. These types of “trans-media” experiences are likely to define “social” in the year to come.

The Cult of Influence

In much the same way that Google has defined a system that rewards those who produce findable content, there is a race on to develop a system that will reward those who wield the most social influence. One particular player has emerged, Klout, determined to establish their platform as the authority of digital influence. Klout’s attempt to convert digital influence into business value underscores a much bigger movement which we’ll continue to see play out in the next year. To some degree everyone now has some digital influence (not just celebrities, academics, policy makers or those who sway public opinion). But for the next year, the cult of influence becomes less about consumer plays like Klout and more about the tools and techniques professionals use to “score” digital influence and actually harness, scale and measure the results of it.

Gamification Nation

No we’re not taking about video games. Rather, game-like qualities are emerging within a number of social apps in your browser or mobile device. From levels, to leaderboards, to badges or points, rewards for participation abound. It’s likely that the trend will have to evolve given how competition for our time and attention this gaming creates. Primarily, gamification has been used in consumer settings, but look for it in other areas from HR, to government, healthcare and even business management. Perhaps negotiating your next raise will be tied to your position on the company’s digital leaderboard.

Social Sharing

Ideas, opinions, media, status updates are all part of what makes social media a powerful and often disruptive force. The media industry was one of the first to understand this, adding sharing options to content, which led to more page views and better status in search results. What comes next in social sharing is more closely aligned with e-commerce or web transactions. For example, Sears allows a user to share a product or review with their networks directly from the site. Sharing that vacation you just booked, or recommending a product, or service from any site to a social network is where sharing goes next. We probably don’t know what we are willing to share until we see the option to do it.

Social Television

For many of us, watching television is already a social act, whether it’s talking to the person next to you, or texting, tweeting, and calling friends about what you’re watching. But television is about to become a social experience in a bigger and broader sense. The X Factor now allows voting via Twitter and highlights other social promotions, which encourages viewers to tap social networks while they watch. Another way media consumption is becoming social comes from a network called Get Glue which acts as something of a Foursquare for media. Participants can “check-in” to their favorite shows (or other forms of media) and collect stickers to tell the world what programs they love. Watch for more of this this year as ratings rise for socially integrated shows.

The Micro Economy

Lastly as we roll into 2012, watch for a more social approach to solving business problems through a sort of micro-economy. Kickstarter gives anyone with a project, the opportunity to get that initiative funded by those who choose to (and patrons receive something in return). A crowdsourcing platform for would-be inventors called Quirky lets the best product ideas rise to the top and then helps them get produced and sold while the “inventor” takes a cut. Air BnB turns homes into hotels and travelers into guests, providing both parties with an opportunity to make and save money. These examples may point to a new future reality where economic value is directly negotiated and exchanged between individuals over institutions.

These are a few emerging trends which come to mind. As with anything, looking to the past often gives us clues for what may come in the future. Please weigh in with your thoughts: where do you see “social” going in 2012?

Image credit: Stockerre

Originally posted on Travis Murdock’s Blog.

Guide to location-based services, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, for PR and marketing professionals.

I checked in on Foursquare as I arrived at a networking event the other day and I was greeted with a free drink if I showed my phone to the bartender. My excitement grew when Foursquare notified me that the restaurant across the street had a two-for-one dinner deal. I grabbed some colleagues to go with me. When we finished, I noticed that the bar across the street offered a free appetizer. So, we trouped across the street determined to follow our Foursquare adventure to its end even if we were already full. When we finished we had consumed drinks, dinner and appetizers all for less than $10 each.

As my experience shows, people are willing to give their location if they know they’ll get something for it. JiWire’s Insights report found that 53 percent of people are willing to show their location to get more relevant ads. Nielsen reports that 24 percent of Americans have a smartphone and we know that most of the new models have GPS. Foursquare has rapidly grown to 500,000 users and 275,000 check-ins in one day. Mashable reports that the other location-based check-in game, Gowalla, has about 100,000 customers. Additionally, nearly every user-generated review service is adding location to its mobile app because of its benefits to customers and the hope to attract higher advertising rates.

As a PR or marketing professional it is about time to add location-based services to your marketing mix and reputation management programs. Your customers are already mentioning your brand in these services and their comments are showing up in search results. It isn’t hard to understand that like other social media, location-based services need active engagement and monitoring. Chuck Reynolds daftly details the impact of these services on local search and search engine visibility in this blog post.

Although not sanctioned by the company, there was even a Foursquare Day last month on April 16 (4/16) that fans put together. I know you have a lot to monitor already in the fragmented social media fracas, so here are some tools that can make it easy to keep an eye on public comments on Foursquare and Gowalla. Both Check-In Mania and FourWhere allow you to search for your business and view the shouts and recommendations people leave.

I love to see the updates and advice from my friends as they check-in throughout their day. It helps me find better restaurants and gets me to try new businesses. As a PR person, I’ve seen it create real-time buzz around an event and drive longer-term search engine results. It’s time to check-in on your brand’s reputation before your customers check-out.

Disclosure: JiWire is a client.

Twitter to Launch “Business Center”

Twitter is inviting a select group of businesses to beta test its new “Business Center”. This new tool is designed to allow businesses to set up company profiles and have multiple users tweet on its behalf.  Most significantly, for the first time companies will be allowed to receive direct messages from anyone….even if the company is not following the person. With this direct access to a company, Twitter is opening a new level of customer service for brands.

Facebook to Launch Location Features This Month

In a move that will surely stir up competition with Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite, Facebook is rumored to be unleashing its long awaited location check-in functionality for individuals and brands this month.  While information is sparse at this point, it is believed that users will be able to check into locations, as they do on Foursquare, and brands will be able to target advertising towards the end user in a much more localized aspect.  McDonalds is going to be the first brand/retailer to test the functionality, allowing users to check into their restaurants, and products will be featured in the users news feed.  This is a potential huge opportunity for advertisers and brands who are jumping head first into the exciting world of localized targeting of end users.

Bing Now Lets You Shop With Your Friends

Along with Twitter and Facebook integration, Bing has added “social shopping” into its search results.  As social influence is a key influencer upon purchase decisions, adding this functionality is a natural progression for the search engine.  Allowing searchers to post products onto their Facebook newsfeeds creates instant advocates or critics for a product and spurs conversation within communities.

3D Recording Device Being Developed for Cell Phones

The hottest trend in film, television, and even magazines today is 3D.  However, a gap still exists between viewing content in 3D and creating content in 3D.  Sharp is attempting to bridge the gap by creating a camera aimed to be installed into cell phones and digital cameras within the next few years.  The device will have 3D recording capabilities for the everyday user, however they have yet to address the issue of viewing the content.

Facebook Privacy Concerns Prompt Students to Create their own Platform

Concerns about privacy and information sharing on Facebook have prompted a group of students in New York to create a new social network.  Project “Diaspora” has raised over $23,000 through micro-funding site Kickstarter to begin development on their new platform.  Their goal is to create software that will let users set up their own personal servers and hubs, and fully control the information they share.  Update: Since this article, Project “Diaspora” has soared past the $50,000 mark in funding.

Zynga Offering “On Game” Ads

Zynga has partnered with ad network SocialVibe to run “on game” advertisements within popular games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars.  As opposed to “in game” advertising, this new delivery concept will run simple message ads at the bottom of the screen offering users game currency for engaging with the ad or offer.  Zynga will charge brands only on initiated interactions, which average about $1.  The new service will allow brands to create their own custom interaction between the consumer and the brand. Zynga promises higher quality offers than past ones which caused backlash for the company, prompting them to halt branded offers for a period of time.

Arguably one of the most compelling pieces of the broader social networking boom has been the ability to take a relationship built online and move it offline or, at the very least, “online” to “in-person.” It’s the flipping of that paradigm that makes the latest wave of location-based social networking services so interesting. Users take their physical, offline location and put it online. While there is often a gaming aspect to this decision (users get points and badges as rewards for various levels of engagement), the broader goal is to draw attention to that location as both an endorsement and an invitation for others to join. Foursquare and Gowalla have dominated conversation to-date, but today’s Friday Five is dedicated to a few lesser-known services and the nuances that set them apart.

My Town

My Town’s first iterations initially came across as a way to play Monopoly against yourself with properties in your own neighborhood. My Town 3.0 has retained the ability to “buy property” with equity built up from check-ins but has opened up to a much more social sphere. This hasn’t gone unnoticed — recent reports have My Town gaining 130,000 new users a week.

Tweetsii

Tweetsii’s check-in process is potentially among the more elaborate while still boasting straightforward usability. Users snap a photo and upload it, tagging the location where that photo was taken in the process, say, at a favorite pie shop. When that user’s contacts pull up the app, they’ll see that photo situated on a map, pointing to where that photo was taken and who posted it.

BrightKite

BrightKite, like Tweetsii, uses photos to paint a dynamic picture of its users’ experiences. However, the set-up of the homepage is closer to a Facebook newsfeed with streaming content appearing next to the users posting it.

Mobiluck

Europe-based Mobiluck takes the personal location experience a step further by giving Symbian and Windows mobile smart phone users the ability to chat with their MSN contacts. Rumor has it they are also working on a feature that allows connections to users from other platforms like Skype and Gchat.

Check.In

Check.In’s catchphrase is “One Checkin to Rule Them All”, a Tolkien reference used to sell a service that ties of each of a users various geo-locating services together, updating them simultaneously. While Check.In’s services do come at the cost fracturing a user’s identity across the individual platforms (points can’t be assigned the same way), those suffering from “check-in fatigue” could be relieved.

The future of newspapers may well be in Colorado, once home to the late “gonzo journalism” provocateur Hunter S. Thomson and today home to no less that 12 free dailies. All of these papers are very local, and perhaps more importantly, successful. This trend is even more interesting in light of tough times at the “real” state papers like the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post.

This isn’t a Colorado-only phenomenon. Palo Alto, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley and arguably Ground Zero in the “print is dead” movement, has two free daily newspapers. A free paper in Santa Monica, Calif., may soon expand.

Online advertising, pay walls, premium subscriptions – newspapers are trying anything to find new business models. But the future of print’s survival may be in Free.

Yes, free. No subscription, purely ad-driven free newspapers; hyper-targeted to neighborhoods and towns, not cities or regions. And rather than published in the morning when the news is at its most stale and competes for attention with people’s Facebook and Twitter feeds, these papers can come out in the late afternoon (for you old-timers, afternoon papers used to be commonplace in the United States.) A free, local, afternoon paper gives you analysis, context and hometown perspective to the news of the day.

“Most revenue for newspapers comes from advertising sales that subsidize the per-paper cost,” Curtis Robinson, editor of the free Portland (Maine) Daily Sun, says on the paper’s web site. “We just work on the model — like broadcast TV and nearly all Internet sites — that people want free news and that advertisers want to reach that readership. Media gurus sometimes assert that free dailies are the “transition” from traditional print media to online-only news — which sounds okay, except that free dailies did well before the Internet.”

The Case for Free (and Local)

It’s a popular conceit that people ever paid for content via their newspaper subscriptions. What they actually paid for was the means of distribution — paper, ink, presses, gasoline, tires and so on.

Advertisers were brought along for the ride – the more subscriptions a paper had the more ads that could be sold, which meant more pages and then, you guessed it, higher distribution costs.

This worked fine until the Internet Age. Newspapers made the mistake of looking at the Internet as simply another means of distribution, figuring that people would come to their web sites and read the news, and more importantly read the ads that helped pay for the web servers.

But search trumped any vision of people reading the news only at a newspaper’s web site. Now they could read the news on Google, Yahoo!, MSN or via RSS and Twitter feeds directly on their computer desktops or mobile devices. New media companies like Google saw value in the content, not the distribution, and traditional newspapers have been trying to catch up ever since.

Free may be the answer. And by staying hyper local – or a “micro daily” as Robinson says – the old distribution costs are greatly reduced. The paper is now attractive to readers and to advertisers, who see greater value in ads targeted to their most likely customers.

The editors of the free Palo Alto Daily Post put it more bluntly on their web site (where you won’t find any news):

“Giving away news online is a dumb way to do business. News is valuable. We put our news in print. The news creates demand for our paper, and increased readership makes our ads more effective than advertising in any other medium.”

Still Much Work to Do

The latest “State of the News Media” report from the Pew Project on Excellence in Journalism offers few surprises: Big-city papers continue to have the worst of it. But small dailies and community weeklies are generally doing better. “The latter come closer to the late-20th century position of newspapers as the dominant source for local information and the place for local merchants to advertise,” the report said.

The New York Times launched regional supplements to its San Francisco and Chicago editions, and even ESPN got into the act, starting regional sites in Chicago, Boston, Dallas and Los Angeles, challenging papers there for the hearts and minds of local sports fans. Yet these new products still don’t give locals what they really want – high school sports coverage, City Hall and Neighborhood Association news, or why that helicopter was circling overhead last night.

All of this news can and should be delivered online and via mobile devices, especially when it comes to time-sensitive information or live events. And location-tagging services like Foursquare and Gowalla will make the news event more local, and therefore more relevant.

The future of newspapers is still comprised more of bits than atoms; this transition can’t be stopped, nor should it be. But local print dailies have a place and a purpose. They appeal to young and old and everyone in between.

In a world drowning in fragments of fleeting “content”, print is the king of context and narrative. And free is the way forward for print to remain relevant – and survive.

Image credit: rogue3w